Amazon's tipping point in apparel amid brick & mortar travails

This year, Amazon will surpass Macy’s, which last year announced it would shut 100 stores, to become the largest seller of apparel in America.New York Times | Updated: May 02, 2017, 10:14 IST

Amazon is exploring the possibility of selling custom-fit clothing, tailored to the more precise measurements of customers.If future anthropologists want to study the rubble of early-21st-century retail, a good place to start will be what Amazon.com did to apparel shopping in the few years before and after 2017.

The outlook for physical retailers is grim, the sector roiled by store closings, layoffs and bankruptcies. This year, Amazon will surpass Macy’s, which last year announced it would shut 100 stores, to become the largest seller of apparel in America, by several analysts’ estimates.

Amazon is exploring the possibility of selling custom-fit clothing, tailored to the more precise measurements of customers, and it has considered acquiring clothing manufacturers to further expand its presence in the category.

If there are tipping points in retail — moments when shopping behaviour swings decisively in one direction — there’s a strong case to be made that apparel is reaching one now, with broad implications for jobs, malls and shopping districts.

Those moments often occur around the time that online shopping reaches about 20% of total national retail spending in a category, the research firm L2 has concluded after studying the evolution of e-commerce. Online clothing and accessory shopping’s share of retail hit 21% last year, according to estimates by Cowen and Company. “I do think this year is the year apparel e-commerce takes off,” said Cooper Smith, an analyst at L2.

In years gone by, buying clothing over the internet was only for the fearless, with most shoppers unwilling to take the risk that a dress or a pair of shoes would fit poorly or look terrible on them. It took time, but shopping habits for clothing are shifting profoundly.